This is my first blog post in years. I talk about how I got burned at the onset of a small project and how I think if I just took a few steps before it would not have snowballed into the mess it is today. My goal is to demonstrate some small practice changes that can hopefully help small teams before they embark on projects for other teams.
I would love feedback on it!
The article is a nice war story. I’ve been in a similar “no test environment, just angry email when you guess wrong about the file format” situation at a fintech company.
But I don’t think the title is too accurate. I clicked on it hoping for a cathartic rant about lousy or nonexistent project requirements, but it was mostly about not having a good test environment, good documentation, or good communication channels with stakeholders.
I feel like you can have all those things and still get handed an awful set of requirements.
If this is the case, then they weren’t sharing a proper schema for the XML files, nor were they providing you with a tool that would run these sanity checks so you could do testing, nor had they bothered documenting the file format properly.
They had literally no right to be rude to your team, especially when their own incompetence was at the root of everything.